Paper: Is Obama the Worst Ever?

Jeffrey H. Anderson

July 25, 2012 2:26 PM

The San Diego Union-Tribune, the 3rd-largest paper in California, offers a scathing, point-by-point indictment of President Obama's presidency—focusing particularly on Obamacare—and asks whether we've ever had a worse president. The Union-Tribune writes of Obama:

"He promised a smart, sweeping overhaul of the U.S. health care system, but ended up giving us a Byzantine mess promoted to the public with myths: that offering subsidized care to tens of millions of people would save money; that people would keep their own doctors; that access to care wouldn’t change; and that rationing would never happen.

"He promised a more sophisticated approach to the economy than that of his predecessor, but had so little common sense that his health law actually gave businesses a big financial incentive to discontinue providing health insurance to their employees....

"He ran as a unifying force who would bring in a new era of civility and racial healing to Washington, but once in office embraced ugly, Chicago-style political hardball that saw nothing wrong with his supporters’ loathsome practice of depicting opposition to his policies as being driven by racism."

The Union-Tribune concludes:

"And in December 2011 – at a time in which one-quarter of American adults who wanted full-time work couldn’t find it, after a year in which the federal deficit was a staggering $1.3 trillion – here was what Barack Obama had to say for himself in a CBS interview: 'I would put our legislative and foreign policy accomplishments in our first two years against any president, with the possible exceptions of Johnson, FDR and Lincoln.'

"Unbelievable. If self-reverence were a crime, our current president would be facing a life sentence."

A recent Newsweek/DailyBeast poll shows that likely voters rank Obama as the 2nd-worst president in American history, behind Herbert Hoover, Richard Nixon, and Jimmy Carter.